Trademark put-downs, wicked sense of humour and hard work – how late Maggie Smith became Queen of the Screen

WHEN Dame Maggie Smith was told in 2013 that a cafe in Venice had named a sandwich after her, she shot back: “Is it ham?”

The acting legend, who has died aged 89, called herself “the Acid Queen” and could cut down herself – or others – with a deadly one-liner like nobody else.

Fellow actor Richard E Grant never quite recovered from her dubbing him “Richard E Can’t” in the early Nineties.

And when a reporter once asked if there were plans to take a play she was in to Broadway, she replied: “Broadway? I wouldn’t take it to Woking.”

Even children were not safe: when one young Harry Potter fan dared to ask whether she could really turn herself into a cat, like her character Professor McGonagall.

She told the youngster: “Just pull yourself together.”

The put-downs became such a trademark that her most famous character of her later years, Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess of Grantham, was entirely based on them.

It comes as…

• Dame Maggie Smith has died aged 89
• Her last picture showed the actress posing for a fashion campaign
• Tributes have been paid to the star by fellow celebs
• Her long health battle with cancer has been revealed
• Dame Maggie spent the last two decades mourning her late husband
• Maggie spent her final days surrounded by her beloved sons

She said she did not count it as acting.

But when it came to the real thing, there was no actress in her league apart from lifelong friend Dame Judi Dench.

And Judi herself had no doubts about which one of them was the best.

She once said: “She leaves me standing.”

Director Sir Nicholas Hytner put it this way: “She can capture in a single moment more than many actors can convey in an entire film.”

But it was the spikiness that people always remembered, which Maggie regretted.

She admitted in a rare interview in 1992: “The awful thing is, I’m sort of very aware when I’m being difficult, but I’m usually so scared. And that’s shaming.”

‘TOTALLY UNIQUE’

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934, in Ilford, Essex.

Her Geordie father worked as a technician in a medical lab, and moved the family to Oxford when World War Two broke out.

There aged 16 red-headed Maggie began training at a local drama school, despite her Glaswegian mothe telling her she would never be an actress “with a face like that”.

By 17, a university drama club spotted her talent and borrowed her to play the lead role of Viola in Twelfth Night.

In the audience one night was future soulmate Beverley Cross, who fell in love then and there.

He later recalled: “She was totally unique in not speaking that kind of Oxford theatrical voice, in the days when everybody was impersonating Olivier.”

He also said she was “very, very funny.”

This comic ability soon got her roles in small revues in London clubs but she struggled to get regular work and briefly ended up as an unlikely hostess on Hughie Green’s ITV quiz show Double Your Money.

She was rescued when a Broadway producer spotted her and whisked her to New York to star in a sketch comedy stage show in 1956.

Critics raved and when she returned home she landed a lead role back home in a big revue called Share My Lettuce, alongside up-and-coming young star Kenneth Williams.

The 1957 show was a smash hit, and London critics went into raptures about the 22 year old – although one paper moaned: “What a name for an actress”.

‘I LOVE OLIVES’

Soon the first of what would be generations of journalists began trying, and failing, to get her to talk about her inner self.

One thwarted profiler in January 1958 admitted he had failed to get any personal information from her until she called him back as he left the interview.

She said: “Oh, I’ve just remembered something about myself. I love olives.”

Her first big film was 1963’s The VIPs, alongside Richard Burton, Liz Taylor and Hollywood matinee idol of the day Rod Taylor.

Rod asked her to marry him in the first week of filming.

In the same year, Laurence Olivier hand-picked her to join the company of his brand-new National Theatre, and to play Desdemona opposite his Othello.

Watching her at one performance was a teenage Julian Fellowes, who would go on to create Downton Abbey.

He later recalled: “I cannot remember a more moving performance than hers. And it haunted me afterwards.”

Meanwhile, in her private life, a three-way battle was going on for her heart.

By this stage Maggie was living with unofficial fiancé Beverley Cross, the young writer who had fallen for her at Oxford.

Hollywood’s Rod Taylor was still trying to win her over too.

Meanwhile she had also met the dazzling young actor Robert Stephens, whose bare-chested portrayal of an Incan god at the National Theatre left audience members panting.

Eventually, in the summer of 1966 Maggie told her suitors that she had chosen the god.

Biographer Michael Coveney said: “Beverley was heartbroken. He later said he was forced to go abroad for a few years or else he would have murdered Robert.”

She and Robert became theatre’s golden couple, so famous that elaborate preparations were made to keep their wedding secret in June 1967, ten days after the birth of first child Chris.

Second son Toby, the future actor, came along in April 1969.

By then Maggie had just become an international sensation with the release of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playing an Edinburgh teacher intent on shaping her “gels” into the “crème de la crème”.

She won a Best Actress Oscar for the role, the first of two Academy Award wins from six nominations.

Her second win would be as Best Supporting Actress in 1978’s California Suite.

But Robert, who had a supporting role in Brodie, struggled to cope with her success.

He had bouts of severe depression, drank wildly, smashed furniture and on one occasion tried to kill himself.

Maggie revealed years later: “It was very, very turbulent. He was a mad person.

“It got worse and then it went on getting worse and worse.”

For years she coped by throwing herself into work, which she described at the time as “the best padded cell in the world”.

But finally, in April 1975, she divorced Robert. Two months later she and the ever-faithful Beverley were married.

In the Eighties, she told a US magazine: “When you meet again, someone you should have married in the first place – it’s like a script.

“The kind of luck that’s too good to be true.”

But the newlyweds were still worried about Robert. Maggie later explained: “When people are out of control it’s very scary.”

So they moved with the boys to Canada where Maggie led Ontario’s renowned annual Shakespeare Festival into a golden age.

She stayed for five years and North American audiences were transfixed by some of her greatest roles which Britain would never see: Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Titania and Rosalind in As You Like It.

One smitten critic said he had watched that performance “through eyes curtained with tears of joy”.

Britain finally got her back, in time for movie classics like 1985’s A Room With A View alongside Judi Dench, 19 days her senior and a friend since they acted together in 1959.

They remained close for the rest of Maggie’s life, and became almost a double act in films like Ladies In Lavender (which Maggie called Lavender Bags) and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies.

Maggie, who was made a Dame in 1990, once explained dismissively: “There are only a few of us left who can play the old bag parts.”

HARDEST YEARS

The Nineties were Maggie’s hardest years, despite successes such as 1993 hit Sister Act.

She struggled with an autoimmune condition eventually diagnosed as Graves’ disease, which required radiotherapy and left her in “a fog of despair”.

Then, in 1998, Beverley died of heart disease, aged 66.

She said years later: “I still miss him so much it’s ridiculous. People say it gets better but it doesn’t. It just gets different, that’s all.”

Once again Maggie coped by working hard, transforming herself into the ulcered, grimy and terrifying homeless woman who moved into Alan Bennett’s front garden in his play The Lady in the Van. It was later made into a film.

And then she joined the Harry Potter juggernaut as Professor McGonagall, who gave the boy wizard his first broom and taught Ron Weasley to dance.

She said of the part: “You feel such a berk.”

But her most famous role was still to come.

Downton Abbey debuted on ITV in 2010, and became Britain’s biggest ever drama export Maggie’s sharp-tongued Lady Violet was, according to creator Julian Fellowes, the series’ “rocket fuel”.

But Maggie always longed to get back to the stage.

She feared she might never manage it, after a 2008 bout with breast cancer left her “flattened” even after her recovery.

But in 2019, aged 84, she finally made her comeback, all alone on stage, in one-woman play A German Life at London’s Bridge Theatre.

It won her her sixth Best Actress gong at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

It also put her back where she admitted she had always been happiest.

Maggie Smith once called the theatre “a much better world”.

She explained: “I’m never shy on stage. Always shy off it. It’s the real world that’s the illusion.”

Tributes have poured in for the beloved actress, including one from King Charles.

The King said in a statement on X: “My wife and I were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Dame Maggie Smith.

“As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both on and off the stage.”

Smith was among the stars in attendance at the King’s coronation at Westminster Abbey last year.

She frequently joined the King at Sandringham Flower Show along with fellow national treasure Dame Judi Dench.